Best con­tri­bu­tion to soci­ety

The month­ly Repair Cafe at Ngaio Union Church.  How cool to have a big room full of incred­i­bly com­pe­tent humans ded­i­cat­ed to help­ing oth­ers for free (you can con­tribute koha and if you don’t have coins, ask them for their bank account num­ber). I took a record play­er and was not con­de­scend­ed to at all when it was dis­cov­ered it has­n’t worked for ten years because of a rogue cue but­ton. Love­ly Andrew also showed me the pack­ag­ing of a switch to go to Mitre 10 to buy so he could fix my lamp too. Hero.

andrew's hand screwing a switch

There were oth­ers there with sewing machines, and fix­ing fur­ni­ture, and bike repairs hap­pen­ing out­side. You’re wel­comed in and told to grab a cup­pa and some­thing to eat while you wait to be called (the bak­ing looked real­ly good but I was wear­ing a face mask). It appears a bunch of peo­ple just come in to chat and get human inter­ac­tion, which is love­ly too. There’s very sol­id seats, and an area set up for kids to colour and play. It was a lit­tle hec­tic so you may want to take some­thing to read and/or noise can­celling head­phones if you’re like­ly to find that a bit dif­fi­cult, but the peo­ple could not have been more love­ly.

I will just also add that as a queer per­son, see­ing how some “Chris­t­ian” church­es have been weapon­is­ing hate late­ly,  it was a love­ly reminder that actu­al­ly, some Chris­tians real­ly are there to make their com­mu­ni­ties bet­ter places, one bro­ken lamp at a time.

The repair cafe hap­pens every third Sat­ur­day of the month, and if you’ve got any­thing you need help with, I real­ly rec­om­mend head­ing along.

Best deci­sion that seemed unfair at the time: 

K‑Zone karaoke on Wake­field Street does not sell soju. Sun­day was prob­a­bly all the bet­ter for not being able to buy it on Sat­ur­day night.

Also hot tip: for K‑Zone — they DO have a but­t­load of Bey­on­cé songs, but you have to search for them under “full name” rather than “first name”. Ask the staff if you’re still hav­ing trou­ble — we were not the first to have this prob­lem.

Best newish bak­ery

Uncle Leo’s in Evans Bay. Absolute­ly stun­ning apple cronuts, good cof­fee (and it’s hard­er to get right with decaf!), love­ly staff. The apple & sage pork sausage roll was also real­ly good too but it would prob­a­bly have been nicer at the start of the day rather than at 2pm after sit­ting in a heat­ed cab­i­net for many hours.

Best con­tribut­ing mem­ber of the Welling­ton­ista (this week)

Me cos I’m the only one that stumped up with con­tri­bu­tions.